![]() ![]() Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being." In its own brilliant way The Loved One makes the same point. ![]() ![]() To which he replied: "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. One of his friends once asked him how he could be so unpleasant and still claim to be a Catholic. Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel, ‘A Handful of Dust,’ is a spiritually infused tale loosely based on Waugh’s own struggles. If the materialists are right about human beings, he's slyly saying, there is no special reason to make a distinction between the two cemeteries of his tale or to turn up our noses at those Soviet scientists and their dog's head.Įvelyn Waugh had a reputation for being a disagreeable man. Waugh for his part is taking deadly aim at philosophical materialism and its implications for human self-understanding. ![]() Waugh could be riotously funny when he set his mind to it and there are amusing stretches in The Loved One, but the book as a whole is satire in the tradition of the Roman poet Juvenal and Jonathan Swift, a satirist whose "A Modest Proposal" skewered British attitudes toward the Irish by suggesting cannibalism as the solution to Irish poverty. The Culture War Turns Violent Read article ![]()
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